Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in military missions because they have the advantages of not placing human life at risk and of lowering operation costs via decreased vehicle weight. These benefits can be fully realized only if UAVs work cooperatively in groups with an efficient exchange of information. This book provides an authoritative reference on cooperative decision and control of UAVs and the means available to solve problems involving them.

The contributors present the information in a manner that abstracts the challenges from the concrete problems, making it possible to leverage the solution methods over a broader range of applications. The first chapter offers representative scenarios to describe the problem and its challenges. The second chapter closely examines these challenges by providing an overview of the algorithms that could be used for cooperative control of UAV teams. Later chapters offer methods for performing multiple tasks on multiple targets and assigning multiple tasks to multiple UAVs in one step. Other topics addressed are the application of mixed integer linear programming and genetic algorithms in situations with strict time constraints, the cooperation of UAVs when there are communication delays, and effectiveness measures derived for operations in uncertain environments.

The book has two appendices. The first describes the operation of the MultiUAV2 simulation software used to test the cooperation control algorithms, while the second details the UAV path planning problem and Dubins' optimal trajectories. A supplementary website offers a MultiUAV2 software manual and relevant code.

AudienceThe book is primarily geared toward researchers working on practical solutions for implementing systems with multiple UAVs. Academicians, students, and others who want to understand the field of UAV cooperative control will find this book a useful reference.

About the EditorsTal Shima is a senior lecturer with the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the TechnionÐIsrael Institute of Technology and is a Horev Fellow in the institute's Leaders in Science and Technology program. His research interests include cooperative decision and control for unmanned systems; missile guidance, control, and estimation; differential games; sensor networks; and optimization.

Steven J. Rasmussen is employed by Miami Valley Aerospace, LLC, as a consultant to the United States Air Force Research Laboratory's Control Science Center of Excellence. He is also Technical Director of RasSimTech, LTD, a simulation software company.